Formation | 14 October 1843 |
---|---|
Type | Statutory corporation |
Headquarters | Hobart, Tasmania, Australia |
Website | www |
Formerly called | Botanical and Horticultural Society of Van Diemen's Land |
The Royal Society of Tasmania (RST) was formed in 1843. It was the first Royal Society outside the United Kingdom, and its mission was the advancement of knowledge. [1]
The work of the Royal Society of Tasmania includes:
The Patron of the Society is Her Excellency, Professor, the Honourable Kate Warner AM, Governor of Tasmania. [1]
The Society was founded on 14 October 1843 at a meeting convened by Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, Lieutenant Governor, as the Botanical and Horticultural Society of Van Diemen’s Land. Its original aim was to ‘develop the physical character of the Island and illustrate its natural history and productions’. [2] Established under its own Act of the Tasmanian Parliament, the Society is permitted it to create its own By-Laws. [3]
In its early years, the Society was responsible for much of the work in founding the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, and also began building up substantial collections of both art and natural history specimens, all housed in The Royal Society of Tasmania Museum. [4] These collections became the basis of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 1885, when the Society gave them to the Government. [3]
The Society also built up a substantial Library. [5] In September 1930 a new library was opened which held more than 20,000 books and pamphlets. The society’s coat of arms, carved in wood by local artist Nellie Payne was presented at this time. [6]
A branch of the Society was formed in Launceston in 1853. It lapsed but was reconstituted in 1921 and has continued since then. [7] [1]
In 1934 the ornithologist Jane Ada Fletcher became the first woman to give a lecture before other members. [8]
Drawing its inspiration from the illustrious original Royal Society founded in London in 1660, the Royal Society of Tasmania is the oldest royal society outside the United Kingdom, having had a continuing existence since 1843. Earlier bodies include the 1837 formation of the Tasmanian Society of Natural History by Sir John Franklin assisted by Ronald Campbell Gunn. [9]
Queen Victoria became Patron of the Botanical and Horticultural Society of Van Diemen’s Land in 1844 and the name was changed to The Royal Society of Van Diemen’s Land for Horticulture, Botany and the Advancement of Science. Under the current Act of Parliament, passed in 1911, the name was shortened to The Royal Society of Tasmania. [10]
On the event of the sesquicentenary of the Society in 1993 it produced the volume Walk to the West to publish James Backhouse Walker's diary of a walk in 1887, including William Piguenit's paintings from that journey.
The text from a plaque to celebrate the 175th anniversary is found in the Monument Australia online record. [11] [12]
In 2017 the Society's membership numbered about 350 from throughout Tasmania and beyond, meeting in Hobart and Launceston. The Society is administered by a Council comprising elected and ex officio members. The membership of the Royal Society of Tasmania is open to all. The priorities of the Society are addressed through lecture programmes, panel discussions, symposia, excursions, publications including the peer reviewed annual journal Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, and a library. Eminent scholars are recognised through various awards and bursaries. [10]
The Society is currently based in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. The Society’s library collection is now based within the University of Tasmania Morris Miller Library, Sandy Bay Campus. [13]
The Northern Chapter is based at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston.
Prior to her death Truganini had pleaded to colonial authorities for a respectful burial, and requested that her ashes be scattered in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. She feared that her body would be dissected and analyzed for scientific purposes as Aboriginal Tasmanian Wiliam Lenne's body had been. Despite her wishes, within two years, her skeleton was exhumed by the members of the Royal Society of Tasmania and later placed on display. [14] [15]
Truganini, also known as Lalla Rookh and Lydgugee, was a woman famous for being widely described as the last "full-blooded" Aboriginal Tasmanian to survive British colonisation. Although she was one of the last speakers of the Indigenous Tasmanian languages, Truganini was not the last Aboriginal Tasmanian.
George Augustus Robinson was an English born builder and self-trained preacher who was employed by the British colonial authorities to conciliate the Indigenous Australians of Van Diemen's Land and the Port Phillip District to the process of British invasion and colonialisation.
The history of Tasmania begins at the end of the Last Glacial Period when it is believed that the island was joined to the Australian mainland. Little is known of the human history of the island until the British colonisation of Tasmania in the 19th century.
Davey Street is a major one way street passing through the outskirts of the Hobart City Centre in Tasmania, Australia. Davey street is named after Thomas Davey, the first Governor of Van Diemen's Land. The street forms a one-way couplet with nearby Macquarie Street connecting traffic from the Southern Outlet in the south with traffic from the Tasman Highway to the east and the Brooker Highway to the north of the city. With annual average daily traffic of 37,200, the road is one of the busier streets in Hobart.
John Glover was an English-born artist. In later life he migrated to Van Diemen’s Land and became a pastoralist during the early colonial period. He has been dubbed "the father of Australian landscape painting."
The Tasmanian emu is an extinct subspecies of emu. It was found in Tasmania, where it had become isolated during the Late Pleistocene. As opposed to the other insular emu taxa, the King Island emu and the Kangaroo Island emu, the population on Tasmania was sizable, meaning that there were no marked effects of small population size as in the other two isolates.
Benjamin Duterrau was an English painter, etcher, engraver, sculptor and art lecturer who emigrated to Tasmania. There he became known for his images of Indigenous people and Australian history paintings.
The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG) is a museum located in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia. The QVMAG is the largest museum in Australia not located in a capital city.
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) is a museum located in Hobart, Tasmania. The museum was established in 1846, by the Royal Society of Tasmania, the oldest Royal Society outside England. The TMAG receives 400,000 visitors annually.
John Watt Beattie was an Australian photographer.
Mount Barrow is a mountain in the northern region of Tasmania, Australia. With an elevation of 1,406 metres (4,613 ft) above sea level, the mountain is located 22 kilometres (14 mi) east-north-east of Launceston. The mountain habitat is a mixture of temperate old growth rainforest, subalpine and alpine landscapes.
The Colony of Tasmania was a British colony that existed on the island of Tasmania from 1856 until 1901, when it federated together with the five other Australian colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia. The possibility of the colony was established when the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Australian Constitutions Act in 1850, granting the right of legislative power to each of the six Australian colonies. The Legislative Council of Van Diemen's Land drafted a new constitution which they passed in 1854, and it was given royal assent by Queen Victoria in 1855. Later in that year the Privy Council approved the colony changing its name from "Van Diemen's Land" to "Tasmania", and in 1856, the newly elected bicameral parliament of Tasmania sat for the first time, establishing Tasmania as a self-governing colony of the British Empire. Tasmania was often referred to as one of the "most British" colonies of the Empire.
Norman James Brian Plomley regarded by some as one of the most respected and scholarly of Australian historians and, until his death, in Launceston, the doyen of Tasmanian Aboriginal scholarship.
Henry Hunter (1832–1892) was a prominent architect and civil servant in Tasmania and Queensland, Australia. He is best known for his work on churches. During his life was also at various times a state magistrate of Tasmania, a member of the Tasmanian State Board of Education, the Hobart Board of Health, a Commissioner for the New Norfolk Insane Asylum and President of the Queensland Institute of Architects.
Oyster Cove is a semi-rural locality in the local government areas (LGA) of Kingborough and Huon Valley in the Hobart and South-east LGA regions of Tasmania. The locality is about 20 kilometres (12 mi) south-west of the town of Kingston. The 2016 census has a population of 319 for the state suburb of Oyster Cove. Part of Oyster Cove is an Indigenous Protected Area due to its history as a colonial holding facility for Aboriginal Tasmanians.
Charles Alfred Woolley was born in Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land. He was an Australian photographer but also created drawings, portraits and visual art. He is best known for his 1866 photographic portraits of the five surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians from Oyster Cove, that were exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia colonial exhibition in Melbourne the same year.
Benjamin Law (1807-1882) was an English sculptor who worked in Australia.
William Henry Breton was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who wrote the memoirs Excursions in New South Wales, Western Australia and Van Dieman's Land, during the years 1830, 1831,1832 and 1833, first published in 1833 and Scandinavian Sketches, or, A Tour in Norway, published in 1835. The books resulted from private visits to Australia, or New Holland as it was then known, in 1829-30 and 1832-33 and to Norway, Sweden and Russia in 1834.
The Lady Franklin Gallery and Ancanthe Park is a historic sandstone museum and 2.96-hectare (7.3-acre) parkland in Lenah Valley, Tasmania, Australia. When it opened on 26 October 1843, it became the first privately funded museum in Australia.
Woureddy, also known as Wurati, Woorady and Mutteelee, was a leading warrior and cleverman from the Nuenonne clan of Aboriginal Tasmanians in Australia.
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